Small Talk
Verleen Tucker
“You hear about Lily Coleman?” Shirley Clark peered at me over the open lid of the washing machine.
I might have said something that morning in the town Laundromat, but maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just gave her that look, back across the row of machines that separated us, that look that had long been the reason most people around these parts called me Lurch.
“Yeah,” Shirley went on. “I heard she went into the VFW the other night with a wad of cash in her hand. Slammed the money down on the bar and said she’d give all the money on the bar to anyone who would drive to Junction and take a baseball bat to her lying, cheating ex-boyfriend’s car.”
Shirley always spoke through the rise of smoke from her cigarette that seemed permanently attached to her lip. It was the eighties. She had that smoke-in-the-eye squint that went along with the long ash. She never seemed to flick the ash. It just fell, from time to time. That day it fell into the washing machine right after she put in the laundry detergent.
“I heard she was only after the guy for his money. You can’t blame her. What can she do? She’s a single mother. Times are hard if you don’t have a man to look after you. I think you can understand that. What a damned mess.”
Shirley had long before gone gray, but I still saw her as I had as a kid: a thin, uppity woman with auburn hair. She might have had more to say on the subject, but Barbara Wolcott came in with her husband’s greasers—he was a roustabout too, like Shirley’s husband—and they got to talking about how this was the last winter they were staying in this nothing-of-a-town and they were headed south next time the temperature dipped below freezing, husbands in tow…or not. I tried to politely listen but found myself more focused on the fact that there was a new dime slot in the machines and that now it would cost thirty-five cents for a wash instead of a quarter. The small coal mine north of town had shut down a few months back, so I was no longer being called out there for electrical work. I was now relying on calls from locals and businesses. And when there’s only a handful of businesses in town, well, you can see where that will get you. A while back, there’d been talk of putting in a subdivision west of town, which would have meant work, but with the mine gone, that idea had been nixed quickly.
Davis was the next person to bring up the gossip around Lily Coleman.
“I heard that Jess Mayberry stood up straight away and said he’d do it. Said with Christmas coming on, he and the missus could use the money.”
We were ice fishing on Avery Reservoir. All winters were cold, but that winter was damned cold. Today was only ten degrees. Davis and I were bundled in our Carhartt overalls and thick down coats, the tears in my navy-blue coat repaired with duct tape. We could see our breath, and Davis’s mustache and beard were white with frost. Davis was wearing the same hat he’d been wearing since high school. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” he’d say to anyone who suggested he might get a new hat. The hat, with flaps that came down over his ears, made him look like Mr. Magoo. I was wearing a red stocking cap my mother had knitted, pulled down snug over my ears, the color standing out with all the other fishermen wearing grays, browns, and blacks. Davis had brought his ten-year-old son, and my kid brother had tagged along. My brother “had potential to go places,” people around town liked to say. He was a high school jock and was carrying a nearly four-point-oh average academically.
While Davis and I were busy with the auger, drilling a hole in the ice, the boys took a broom, swept the snow off the frozen reservoir in a wide oval, put their skates on, and took off. Humans weren’t the only ones who’d been on the ice. The frozen reservoir was crisscrossed with animal tracks: white tail rabbits—now turned from gray to completely white—fox, and coyotes. One noticeable trail had been made by a small herd of elk.
We could hear the steady drone of snowmobiles off in the distance as the snowmobilers circled nearby Sleepy Cat Peak. Eddie down the way from us had his transistor radio tuned to KRAI with the volume turned up so everyone was listening to the Broncos game.
“Problem was,” Davis continued, “his missus was there with him at the bar. She’d been over in the corner chitchatting with Dottie Baker. When she realized what was going on, she stood up and got between him and the cash. I heard she chewed him up and down, saying he had a wife and two kids to think about and that Lily needed to tend to her own knitting. She pretty much shoved Jess out the door toward their car. Last thing anyone heard her say was ‘And, Lily, you keep your hands to yourself.’”
Just then a trout struck my line. It was a nice one about fifteen inches long. After we put the trout on a stringer and put it back in the water, Davis reached into his cooler and pulled out a couple of tall boys. We popped them open in celebration. I swilled the cold beer in my mouth, letting it warm a few moments before swallowing. Once the alcohol started to take effect, I relaxed a little, knowing I only had to catch two more fish so my mother and brother and I would have something to eat that night at dinner. If the fishing was good that day, we’d have enough to freeze for a few more meals later in the week.
Davis and I had seen eye-to-eye on just about everything, since we were kids, and now that we both stood over six feet tall, that had not changed. Davis had known Dad, including when his health went south back when Davis and I were twelve. Davis kept coming by and getting me out of the house. Dad started losing weight. Dad couldn’t get out of bed anymore. Dad went to the hospital and never came back home, and Davis kept coming by. Dad was gone never to return, and Davis kept coming by. He never said anything about Dad, but he just kept getting me out of the house, over to the ball field where a game of catch was being played or down to the river where kids were tubing or up hiking on China Walls. I swear to God, the pain of losing my father and the fear of how we would possibly get by without him were so great that if Davis hadn’t kept coming by back in those days, I might still be in my room, sitting on my bed, gone silent to the world.
When we were finally old enough to know better, after a night of passing a flask between us, I asked Davis why he never said anything about Dad. We were up on Lost Solar, hiking to Budge’s Lodge, and had camped for the night. A hoot owl sounded occasionally, crickets chirped, and the South Fork River rippled nearby. The glow of Meeker lights faintly tipped the horizon to the east. Otherwise, our meager campfire was the only light for miles and miles to compete with the luminous band of the Milky Way that stretched across the heaven.
Davis took a swig of Jack Daniel’s, grimaced, wiped his mouth, and took in air to help ease the burn. He put his head down. In the firelight, I could see his jaw twitch while he struggled to contain his emotions. He finally lifted his head, looked over at me, and said, “I never brought up your dad because I knew all you’d say was that it hurt like a son of a bitch, and I already knew that, so why bring it up.”
Olga was the next person to talk about it. She was checking out my groceries at the local market. Some groceries she rang up with the stamped price. For others, like cans of green beans—or whatever suited her fancy—she looked over at me and quietly said, “Oh, this is an old price. This is on sale this week.” And she rung up twenty-five cents instead of thirty-five cents. Olga took care of us at the grocery store, and my mother always took care of Olga when she came to my mother’s beauty shop in the small room in our home.
“After Jess’s wife got him out of the VFW, I hear everyone in the bar kind of quieted down.” Olga peered at me over her bifocals that always were perched lower on her nose so she could see the cash register keys.
“But people are thinking that someone in the bar that night finally did take that money,” a voice in line behind me said. “The bar was dark, you know, but by the end of the night, the money Lily had slapped on the bar was gone.”
It was Linda Newby, who was with her cousin Janet Newby. Newbys all looked the same. Same mousy brown hair. Same wide-set eyes. Same big toothy, grin.
“Well, you know who did it,” said Janet. “It was George Dodge. Remember, he and Lily dated all through high school, and then Lily dumped him when she went away to college. He’s never gotten over her. Everybody knows that.”
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” said Linda. “George wouldn’t harm a fly, let alone take a bat to Lily’s boyfriend’s car. I heard it was Jack Knight. He’s been in love with Lily since seventh grade.”
About that time, Lucy Paul walked in, and everyone shut up. Lucy’s husband was the state bull, and that’s all that needed to be said about that.
I was in the post office mailing a package for my mother when the postmaster, Cleve Jacobsen, told me he was pretty sure it was John Turner who’d taken the money.
“He’s always in the VFW in the back room playing poker. You know that. And he wouldn’t even need a reason to help Lily out. John Turner would take a baseball bat to a car for the hell of it.”
People loved to tell stories about John Turner, like the one when he was in his Chevy Camaro on North Lincoln Avenue in Junction waiting for a light to turn. A man pulled up next to Turner on a Harley-Davidson. The man revved the engine a couple of times and then looked over at Turner and said, “You wanna drag, man?”
Without batting an eye, Turner replied, “Yeah, I drag your ass off that motorcycle and beat the shit outta you.”
Turner was my roommate for the two years I spent at Mesa College. On my way home to Meeker to see my family sophomore year, I was in a bad car accident near Rifle. Lost control on a curve, rolled it, and ended up in the ditch. When I finally got back to our school apartment, my stereo and all my albums, my posters, most of my clothes, and my alarm clock were missing from my room. John was out in the living room watching a Broncos game. I don’t remember saying anything to him. Just stood in the living room staring at him. Turner didn’t even look up from the game. He took a swig of beer and said, “Hey, man. They called and told me that it looked like you were going to die, so I put your stuff out on the front lawn, had a yard sale, and then the guys and I threw a party with the money.”
“Yes, Lurch,” said Mr. Jacobsen said now, as if he was reading my mind. “John Turner took the money, and now it’s only a matter of time before we hear about the car.”
Winter had begun to slowly fade when the first news of the battered car made its way to the valley. The first of the migrating birds had returned, robins and red-winged blackbirds, and after a snowfall, when the temperatures warmed and the grass drank the melting snow, everything would turn green, losing the parched winter shade of ochre.
The first I heard that the car had been smashed was from my mother. She and Olga were talking in Mom’s shop. Olga was getting a permanent, a stiff whiff of ammonia told me as I entered the front door. My mother’s shop was in a small room that opened with French doors off the living room, so I could hear the conversation as I sat on the couch. I wanted to hear what they said, so I did not turn the TV on or go to the kitchen to get something to eat like I normally would.
“Some people around town are saying that Lily did it herself,” said Olga. “I can kind of believe it. She’s always been a spitfire.”
When Lily had been little, they called her a pixie. She was tiny, with an upturned nose and spunk written all over her face. Everyone adored her. When she flitted into a room, with her eyes sparkling, and her tiny voice chattering away, heads turned.
By the time she hit high school—no, wait, maybe even junior high—all the guys wanted to take her out. A few like Dodge got lucky. But as she grew up, Lily learned the hard way that pixies and fairy tales are not real. By the time she was twenty-eight, she’d been married and divorced twice. She had a small boy in tow. And now, apparently, a lying, cheating ex-boyfriend.
“There’s no way Lily would have done it herself,” I heard my mother say. “Not with a kid. She would keep her hands clean from taking part in any thing like that.”
“But you know they have to be looking at her,” Olga said.
“Son of a bitch, I heard that car was a 1970 Dodge Charger R/T,” Butch Kelly said as he passed me a splicing of wire I’d had him hold. I was rewiring the electrical lines in his garage, replacing the old tube and knob that Butch had begun to worry was so old it was now a fire hazard. Which it was.
“Damn, a fine muscle car gone to waste. You know, a 440, six-pack, V8. Lime green, someone told me. Chrome wheels. Hot. Now headed to the trash heap. Just because someone couldn’t keep their hands in their own pockets. You know what I mean?”
Butch always got right into whatever work he had me do. Or maybe I should say he had a knack of getting in the way. He was one of the lucky ones who’d retired before the mine shut down, so he had time on his hands and a little money in his pocket to burn. I wondered a time or two if he had me come work on this or that so he had someone to talk to. So he had someone to hear him think.
“His rich granddaddy bought him that car. That’s what I heard. He could have never come up with the money to buy it himself. Not working as a bartender at The Rose. But hey, you know, maybe tips are good when you’re a ladies’ man.”
In the tight confines of the garage, it took a couple of steps one way or the other to get past Butch to go outside to my toolbox in the back of my truck. Butch followed me, saying, “You need me to grab anything?”
I just shook my head and reached in the back of my truck to get more wire.
“Too bad the poor jerk wasn’t driving an old beat-up hippie car or something like that.” Butch leaned over the back of my truck with me. “Whoever took a bat to that car is going to be looking down the barrel of a lawman’s gun. They’re going to be looking down their son-of-a-bitching nose at a felony instead of a misdemeanor.”
Spring was making way for summer. The lilac bushes were set to bloom any day. The river was up with runoff from the mountains. I was at Hannah Rasmussen’s home, helping her put in her garden. Okay, I was preparing the backyard for planting, and being that she was pushing eighty, she was watching me work. Not only was I doing electrical work but I had also started doing odd jobs around town to make ends meet. She wore a wide-brimmed hat to protect her onion-like skin from the morning rays and gloves, which she said more than once, should have never gone out of style for ladies everywhere.
“I can’t see what the fuss is and why they’re coming so hard at us,” Hannah said, her trembling, frail hand up to her cheek. “The man is a no-count cheater and had it coming.”
Hannah’s husband had been gotten around quite a bit himself, and everybody in town knew it. I was not surprised she felt the police’s rounds as a personal attack against what she considered the right side of justice.
“He was probably skirting around with all kinds of women, truth be told. They need to be checking down there in Mesa County instead of snooping around up here. Could have been another woman he was running around with. Could have been an irate husband whose wife he’d crossed the line with.”
Our one and only police officer was busy. He’d talked to Dodge. He’d sat down Jack Knight. John Turner? Yes. More than once. Butch told me they were taking bets around town as to who might end up getting nabbed. Everyone seemed suspect. Our officer even talked to Davis.
After that happened, Davis found me at the bar and motioned me outside and into his car. He started driving slow toward my house.
“I told them you and I hiked back in to Uncle Kenneth’s cabin the weekend it happened,” he said, his face looking grim in the light from the dash.
It had started raining, the windshield wipers drowning out the sound of my pounding heart.
When he pulled up at the curb by my house, I asked him if he wanted to come in.
“For a beer,” I said.
“I’m going home.” Davis couldn’t keep the exasperation out of his voice. “I gotta wife and kid.”
After I got out, he pulled quickly away and drove down the street. I stood there in the pouring rain watching him go. I watched until his taillights disappeared into the storm. I watched until I knew he’d made a left and turned toward home.
Summer was high before Officer Ledbetter—the guys called him Bedwetter behind his back—eased into the booth I was in at the café. The ceiling fans whirred. The front door was open, with fresh air from the cool of the morning circulating in through the screen door. By the time I left the café around one, the door would be closed to keep the heat of the afternoon out, and the fans would go throughout the afternoon and into the night until the café closed at nine.
“You know, Lurch, it’s just a hellava mess. This guy, his granddaddy’s got money, and he is pissed. He knows people down there in Mesa County. He’s saying he wants justice. Says somebody is going to pay. Says someone needs to be made an example of so this sort of nonsense doesn’t happen again.”
Ledbetter watched me watching him for a moment.
“Lurch, the trouble here is that if anyone told you something, I know you. I know you would take that information to the grave with you. I’ve told you a thing or two, and I know what I’ve said to you has never crossed your lips to anyone else.”
I took a bite of my chicken-fried steak and washed it down with swig of beer. Ledbetter sat there patiently.
“George, no one has told me that they did it.” I kept my voice steady and looked him squarely in the eyes.
Ledbetter sat there for one more beat and then sighed as he worked his way out of the booth and headed toward the door.
He glanced back as he left, saying, “Looks like things are picking up for you now that you’ve got that handyman business going.” He looked pointedly at my meal.
I nodded and looked back at my plate. I didn’t take another bite until I heard the screen door slam.
Ledbetter kept on through the fall. The trees turned. Leaves fell. The wind became bitter. A skiff of snow happened now and again. A private investigator showed up. No one said anything. The private investigator left. The case grew cold. Dust settled in on a file that had now been moved to the back room. Lily remarried. Lily got another divorce. John Turner stayed the most compelling suspect, and as time went by, he got hauled in more than once to be questioned about it. I never worried about John. I knew he could take care of himself. And in my way of thinking, he kind of had it coming. Over the years, the story of Lily and her lying, cheating ex-boyfriend became nothing more that a favorite story people liked to talk about, when the mood was right and the alcohol was flowing.
Most of the people around then are gone now. Mom died ten years ago. Ledbetter eventually left town and retired somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Butch died not longer after he talked to me that day in his garage. Hannah, she made it to ninety-seven.
Davis died last winter. His wife had passed several years before. Just like my brother, his son practiced law on the Front Range those days, and he was busy taking care of a family of his own. I checked on Davis every day. I knew his heart was giving out, so I stopped by each day to chop and stack firewood, shovel his walk, bring him groceries, and sit with him on his porch on good days. I tried to take care of him to pay him back for all he’d done for me. But it wasn’t enough. His heart died during a January night along with the embers in his wood stove. I found him cold one morning in his cold house.
I think of Davis now every day. We always saw things the same way. Like me, if Davis knew something, he’d take it to his grave. And he did. In those moments when I think of him, I seldom think of the things we said and did over the years. I always think back to Lily. To a night in the bar. To a car and a baseball bat. To the cool feel of smooth wood in my hand. I think of that one conversation we never had.
“When did you know?” I hear myself say to him.
“When there was extra money to help your brother go to college,” he always answers.
“Why didn’t you ever ask me about it?” I always press on.
“Because I knew all you would say is that you did what you had to do to take care of your family, and I already knew that so why bring it up.”
Verleen Tucker
“You hear about Lily Coleman?” Shirley Clark peered at me over the open lid of the washing machine.
I might have said something that morning in the town Laundromat, but maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just gave her that look, back across the row of machines that separated us, that look that had long been the reason most people around these parts called me Lurch.
“Yeah,” Shirley went on. “I heard she went into the VFW the other night with a wad of cash in her hand. Slammed the money down on the bar and said she’d give all the money on the bar to anyone who would drive to Junction and take a baseball bat to her lying, cheating ex-boyfriend’s car.”
Shirley always spoke through the rise of smoke from her cigarette that seemed permanently attached to her lip. It was the eighties. She had that smoke-in-the-eye squint that went along with the long ash. She never seemed to flick the ash. It just fell, from time to time. That day it fell into the washing machine right after she put in the laundry detergent.
“I heard she was only after the guy for his money. You can’t blame her. What can she do? She’s a single mother. Times are hard if you don’t have a man to look after you. I think you can understand that. What a damned mess.”
Shirley had long before gone gray, but I still saw her as I had as a kid: a thin, uppity woman with auburn hair. She might have had more to say on the subject, but Barbara Wolcott came in with her husband’s greasers—he was a roustabout too, like Shirley’s husband—and they got to talking about how this was the last winter they were staying in this nothing-of-a-town and they were headed south next time the temperature dipped below freezing, husbands in tow…or not. I tried to politely listen but found myself more focused on the fact that there was a new dime slot in the machines and that now it would cost thirty-five cents for a wash instead of a quarter. The small coal mine north of town had shut down a few months back, so I was no longer being called out there for electrical work. I was now relying on calls from locals and businesses. And when there’s only a handful of businesses in town, well, you can see where that will get you. A while back, there’d been talk of putting in a subdivision west of town, which would have meant work, but with the mine gone, that idea had been nixed quickly.
Davis was the next person to bring up the gossip around Lily Coleman.
“I heard that Jess Mayberry stood up straight away and said he’d do it. Said with Christmas coming on, he and the missus could use the money.”
We were ice fishing on Avery Reservoir. All winters were cold, but that winter was damned cold. Today was only ten degrees. Davis and I were bundled in our Carhartt overalls and thick down coats, the tears in my navy-blue coat repaired with duct tape. We could see our breath, and Davis’s mustache and beard were white with frost. Davis was wearing the same hat he’d been wearing since high school. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” he’d say to anyone who suggested he might get a new hat. The hat, with flaps that came down over his ears, made him look like Mr. Magoo. I was wearing a red stocking cap my mother had knitted, pulled down snug over my ears, the color standing out with all the other fishermen wearing grays, browns, and blacks. Davis had brought his ten-year-old son, and my kid brother had tagged along. My brother “had potential to go places,” people around town liked to say. He was a high school jock and was carrying a nearly four-point-oh average academically.
While Davis and I were busy with the auger, drilling a hole in the ice, the boys took a broom, swept the snow off the frozen reservoir in a wide oval, put their skates on, and took off. Humans weren’t the only ones who’d been on the ice. The frozen reservoir was crisscrossed with animal tracks: white tail rabbits—now turned from gray to completely white—fox, and coyotes. One noticeable trail had been made by a small herd of elk.
We could hear the steady drone of snowmobiles off in the distance as the snowmobilers circled nearby Sleepy Cat Peak. Eddie down the way from us had his transistor radio tuned to KRAI with the volume turned up so everyone was listening to the Broncos game.
“Problem was,” Davis continued, “his missus was there with him at the bar. She’d been over in the corner chitchatting with Dottie Baker. When she realized what was going on, she stood up and got between him and the cash. I heard she chewed him up and down, saying he had a wife and two kids to think about and that Lily needed to tend to her own knitting. She pretty much shoved Jess out the door toward their car. Last thing anyone heard her say was ‘And, Lily, you keep your hands to yourself.’”
Just then a trout struck my line. It was a nice one about fifteen inches long. After we put the trout on a stringer and put it back in the water, Davis reached into his cooler and pulled out a couple of tall boys. We popped them open in celebration. I swilled the cold beer in my mouth, letting it warm a few moments before swallowing. Once the alcohol started to take effect, I relaxed a little, knowing I only had to catch two more fish so my mother and brother and I would have something to eat that night at dinner. If the fishing was good that day, we’d have enough to freeze for a few more meals later in the week.
Davis and I had seen eye-to-eye on just about everything, since we were kids, and now that we both stood over six feet tall, that had not changed. Davis had known Dad, including when his health went south back when Davis and I were twelve. Davis kept coming by and getting me out of the house. Dad started losing weight. Dad couldn’t get out of bed anymore. Dad went to the hospital and never came back home, and Davis kept coming by. Dad was gone never to return, and Davis kept coming by. He never said anything about Dad, but he just kept getting me out of the house, over to the ball field where a game of catch was being played or down to the river where kids were tubing or up hiking on China Walls. I swear to God, the pain of losing my father and the fear of how we would possibly get by without him were so great that if Davis hadn’t kept coming by back in those days, I might still be in my room, sitting on my bed, gone silent to the world.
When we were finally old enough to know better, after a night of passing a flask between us, I asked Davis why he never said anything about Dad. We were up on Lost Solar, hiking to Budge’s Lodge, and had camped for the night. A hoot owl sounded occasionally, crickets chirped, and the South Fork River rippled nearby. The glow of Meeker lights faintly tipped the horizon to the east. Otherwise, our meager campfire was the only light for miles and miles to compete with the luminous band of the Milky Way that stretched across the heaven.
Davis took a swig of Jack Daniel’s, grimaced, wiped his mouth, and took in air to help ease the burn. He put his head down. In the firelight, I could see his jaw twitch while he struggled to contain his emotions. He finally lifted his head, looked over at me, and said, “I never brought up your dad because I knew all you’d say was that it hurt like a son of a bitch, and I already knew that, so why bring it up.”
Olga was the next person to talk about it. She was checking out my groceries at the local market. Some groceries she rang up with the stamped price. For others, like cans of green beans—or whatever suited her fancy—she looked over at me and quietly said, “Oh, this is an old price. This is on sale this week.” And she rung up twenty-five cents instead of thirty-five cents. Olga took care of us at the grocery store, and my mother always took care of Olga when she came to my mother’s beauty shop in the small room in our home.
“After Jess’s wife got him out of the VFW, I hear everyone in the bar kind of quieted down.” Olga peered at me over her bifocals that always were perched lower on her nose so she could see the cash register keys.
“But people are thinking that someone in the bar that night finally did take that money,” a voice in line behind me said. “The bar was dark, you know, but by the end of the night, the money Lily had slapped on the bar was gone.”
It was Linda Newby, who was with her cousin Janet Newby. Newbys all looked the same. Same mousy brown hair. Same wide-set eyes. Same big toothy, grin.
“Well, you know who did it,” said Janet. “It was George Dodge. Remember, he and Lily dated all through high school, and then Lily dumped him when she went away to college. He’s never gotten over her. Everybody knows that.”
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” said Linda. “George wouldn’t harm a fly, let alone take a bat to Lily’s boyfriend’s car. I heard it was Jack Knight. He’s been in love with Lily since seventh grade.”
About that time, Lucy Paul walked in, and everyone shut up. Lucy’s husband was the state bull, and that’s all that needed to be said about that.
I was in the post office mailing a package for my mother when the postmaster, Cleve Jacobsen, told me he was pretty sure it was John Turner who’d taken the money.
“He’s always in the VFW in the back room playing poker. You know that. And he wouldn’t even need a reason to help Lily out. John Turner would take a baseball bat to a car for the hell of it.”
People loved to tell stories about John Turner, like the one when he was in his Chevy Camaro on North Lincoln Avenue in Junction waiting for a light to turn. A man pulled up next to Turner on a Harley-Davidson. The man revved the engine a couple of times and then looked over at Turner and said, “You wanna drag, man?”
Without batting an eye, Turner replied, “Yeah, I drag your ass off that motorcycle and beat the shit outta you.”
Turner was my roommate for the two years I spent at Mesa College. On my way home to Meeker to see my family sophomore year, I was in a bad car accident near Rifle. Lost control on a curve, rolled it, and ended up in the ditch. When I finally got back to our school apartment, my stereo and all my albums, my posters, most of my clothes, and my alarm clock were missing from my room. John was out in the living room watching a Broncos game. I don’t remember saying anything to him. Just stood in the living room staring at him. Turner didn’t even look up from the game. He took a swig of beer and said, “Hey, man. They called and told me that it looked like you were going to die, so I put your stuff out on the front lawn, had a yard sale, and then the guys and I threw a party with the money.”
“Yes, Lurch,” said Mr. Jacobsen said now, as if he was reading my mind. “John Turner took the money, and now it’s only a matter of time before we hear about the car.”
Winter had begun to slowly fade when the first news of the battered car made its way to the valley. The first of the migrating birds had returned, robins and red-winged blackbirds, and after a snowfall, when the temperatures warmed and the grass drank the melting snow, everything would turn green, losing the parched winter shade of ochre.
The first I heard that the car had been smashed was from my mother. She and Olga were talking in Mom’s shop. Olga was getting a permanent, a stiff whiff of ammonia told me as I entered the front door. My mother’s shop was in a small room that opened with French doors off the living room, so I could hear the conversation as I sat on the couch. I wanted to hear what they said, so I did not turn the TV on or go to the kitchen to get something to eat like I normally would.
“Some people around town are saying that Lily did it herself,” said Olga. “I can kind of believe it. She’s always been a spitfire.”
When Lily had been little, they called her a pixie. She was tiny, with an upturned nose and spunk written all over her face. Everyone adored her. When she flitted into a room, with her eyes sparkling, and her tiny voice chattering away, heads turned.
By the time she hit high school—no, wait, maybe even junior high—all the guys wanted to take her out. A few like Dodge got lucky. But as she grew up, Lily learned the hard way that pixies and fairy tales are not real. By the time she was twenty-eight, she’d been married and divorced twice. She had a small boy in tow. And now, apparently, a lying, cheating ex-boyfriend.
“There’s no way Lily would have done it herself,” I heard my mother say. “Not with a kid. She would keep her hands clean from taking part in any thing like that.”
“But you know they have to be looking at her,” Olga said.
“Son of a bitch, I heard that car was a 1970 Dodge Charger R/T,” Butch Kelly said as he passed me a splicing of wire I’d had him hold. I was rewiring the electrical lines in his garage, replacing the old tube and knob that Butch had begun to worry was so old it was now a fire hazard. Which it was.
“Damn, a fine muscle car gone to waste. You know, a 440, six-pack, V8. Lime green, someone told me. Chrome wheels. Hot. Now headed to the trash heap. Just because someone couldn’t keep their hands in their own pockets. You know what I mean?”
Butch always got right into whatever work he had me do. Or maybe I should say he had a knack of getting in the way. He was one of the lucky ones who’d retired before the mine shut down, so he had time on his hands and a little money in his pocket to burn. I wondered a time or two if he had me come work on this or that so he had someone to talk to. So he had someone to hear him think.
“His rich granddaddy bought him that car. That’s what I heard. He could have never come up with the money to buy it himself. Not working as a bartender at The Rose. But hey, you know, maybe tips are good when you’re a ladies’ man.”
In the tight confines of the garage, it took a couple of steps one way or the other to get past Butch to go outside to my toolbox in the back of my truck. Butch followed me, saying, “You need me to grab anything?”
I just shook my head and reached in the back of my truck to get more wire.
“Too bad the poor jerk wasn’t driving an old beat-up hippie car or something like that.” Butch leaned over the back of my truck with me. “Whoever took a bat to that car is going to be looking down the barrel of a lawman’s gun. They’re going to be looking down their son-of-a-bitching nose at a felony instead of a misdemeanor.”
Spring was making way for summer. The lilac bushes were set to bloom any day. The river was up with runoff from the mountains. I was at Hannah Rasmussen’s home, helping her put in her garden. Okay, I was preparing the backyard for planting, and being that she was pushing eighty, she was watching me work. Not only was I doing electrical work but I had also started doing odd jobs around town to make ends meet. She wore a wide-brimmed hat to protect her onion-like skin from the morning rays and gloves, which she said more than once, should have never gone out of style for ladies everywhere.
“I can’t see what the fuss is and why they’re coming so hard at us,” Hannah said, her trembling, frail hand up to her cheek. “The man is a no-count cheater and had it coming.”
Hannah’s husband had been gotten around quite a bit himself, and everybody in town knew it. I was not surprised she felt the police’s rounds as a personal attack against what she considered the right side of justice.
“He was probably skirting around with all kinds of women, truth be told. They need to be checking down there in Mesa County instead of snooping around up here. Could have been another woman he was running around with. Could have been an irate husband whose wife he’d crossed the line with.”
Our one and only police officer was busy. He’d talked to Dodge. He’d sat down Jack Knight. John Turner? Yes. More than once. Butch told me they were taking bets around town as to who might end up getting nabbed. Everyone seemed suspect. Our officer even talked to Davis.
After that happened, Davis found me at the bar and motioned me outside and into his car. He started driving slow toward my house.
“I told them you and I hiked back in to Uncle Kenneth’s cabin the weekend it happened,” he said, his face looking grim in the light from the dash.
It had started raining, the windshield wipers drowning out the sound of my pounding heart.
When he pulled up at the curb by my house, I asked him if he wanted to come in.
“For a beer,” I said.
“I’m going home.” Davis couldn’t keep the exasperation out of his voice. “I gotta wife and kid.”
After I got out, he pulled quickly away and drove down the street. I stood there in the pouring rain watching him go. I watched until his taillights disappeared into the storm. I watched until I knew he’d made a left and turned toward home.
Summer was high before Officer Ledbetter—the guys called him Bedwetter behind his back—eased into the booth I was in at the café. The ceiling fans whirred. The front door was open, with fresh air from the cool of the morning circulating in through the screen door. By the time I left the café around one, the door would be closed to keep the heat of the afternoon out, and the fans would go throughout the afternoon and into the night until the café closed at nine.
“You know, Lurch, it’s just a hellava mess. This guy, his granddaddy’s got money, and he is pissed. He knows people down there in Mesa County. He’s saying he wants justice. Says somebody is going to pay. Says someone needs to be made an example of so this sort of nonsense doesn’t happen again.”
Ledbetter watched me watching him for a moment.
“Lurch, the trouble here is that if anyone told you something, I know you. I know you would take that information to the grave with you. I’ve told you a thing or two, and I know what I’ve said to you has never crossed your lips to anyone else.”
I took a bite of my chicken-fried steak and washed it down with swig of beer. Ledbetter sat there patiently.
“George, no one has told me that they did it.” I kept my voice steady and looked him squarely in the eyes.
Ledbetter sat there for one more beat and then sighed as he worked his way out of the booth and headed toward the door.
He glanced back as he left, saying, “Looks like things are picking up for you now that you’ve got that handyman business going.” He looked pointedly at my meal.
I nodded and looked back at my plate. I didn’t take another bite until I heard the screen door slam.
Ledbetter kept on through the fall. The trees turned. Leaves fell. The wind became bitter. A skiff of snow happened now and again. A private investigator showed up. No one said anything. The private investigator left. The case grew cold. Dust settled in on a file that had now been moved to the back room. Lily remarried. Lily got another divorce. John Turner stayed the most compelling suspect, and as time went by, he got hauled in more than once to be questioned about it. I never worried about John. I knew he could take care of himself. And in my way of thinking, he kind of had it coming. Over the years, the story of Lily and her lying, cheating ex-boyfriend became nothing more that a favorite story people liked to talk about, when the mood was right and the alcohol was flowing.
Most of the people around then are gone now. Mom died ten years ago. Ledbetter eventually left town and retired somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Butch died not longer after he talked to me that day in his garage. Hannah, she made it to ninety-seven.
Davis died last winter. His wife had passed several years before. Just like my brother, his son practiced law on the Front Range those days, and he was busy taking care of a family of his own. I checked on Davis every day. I knew his heart was giving out, so I stopped by each day to chop and stack firewood, shovel his walk, bring him groceries, and sit with him on his porch on good days. I tried to take care of him to pay him back for all he’d done for me. But it wasn’t enough. His heart died during a January night along with the embers in his wood stove. I found him cold one morning in his cold house.
I think of Davis now every day. We always saw things the same way. Like me, if Davis knew something, he’d take it to his grave. And he did. In those moments when I think of him, I seldom think of the things we said and did over the years. I always think back to Lily. To a night in the bar. To a car and a baseball bat. To the cool feel of smooth wood in my hand. I think of that one conversation we never had.
“When did you know?” I hear myself say to him.
“When there was extra money to help your brother go to college,” he always answers.
“Why didn’t you ever ask me about it?” I always press on.
“Because I knew all you would say is that you did what you had to do to take care of your family, and I already knew that so why bring it up.”
